Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: May 24, 1910
Rating: ★
Review:

Cadres fleuris © Émile Cohl‘Cadres fleuris’ is one of the least comprehensible and most boring of Cohl’s tableau films.

In this film the frames themselves are much more elaborate than the images inside the frames, which are reduced to a small part of the screen. There’s some cut-out animation, and some stop-motion, but the purpose of the film remains utterly puzzling, especially when some portraits of contemporary world leaders (e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II) come along.

With the best of will one can see this film as an early forerunner of the abstract animation experiments of the 1920s and 1930s by Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger. Anyway, ‘Cadres fleuris’ was Cohl’s last venture into the tableau film, a genre which in the early 1910s quickly became obsolete, anyhow.

Watch ‘Cadres fleuris’ yourself and tell me what you think:

‘Cadres fleuris’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’